For Brad Flora, the smart Chicago Internet entrepreneur who founded the popular content-sharing website WindyCitizen.com, the third time proved to be the charm.

On Wednesday, Flora was awarded a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation's 2010 News Challenge to develop new uses of digital technology. It came after Flora's third attempt to win a piece of the foundation's prize money, which this year totaled $2.74 million.

One of the things frequently noted about Studs Terkel’s Division Street: America is that there weren’t any touchstones in American culture by 1967. There was the Vietnam War, about which event many people had strong feelings, and World War II before that. Yet many of Terkel’s subjects had no opinions on either. Jan Myrdal’s 1963 Report From a Chinese Village, the book on which Studs’ original Division Street: America project was based, was a deliberately uncritical (“impartial”) look at China following the Maoist revolution. It was an event Myrdal’s interview subjects all related to, in one way or another. And in the days after September 11, everyone agreed: this was our touchstone. She runs a cat shelter in Edgewater.

At The Globe, the center of soccer world in Chicago, the sunlight streaming in from the windows is causing a few of the morning revelers to squint. It’s a gorgeous day outside but no one here much cares. The World Cup goes on and on, and an impossibly ethnically diverse Swiss team is about to stun the heavily favored Spaniards.

In The Globe’s front room, so many big screens detail the action on ESPN. Men and women bend over their coffees and mugs of beer. Every seat is taken, though everyone seems to be struggling to face away from the blinding windows. In the back, a dark and sunless cavern, a smaller group is immersed in Univisión’s Spanish-language broadcast. The voices on the screens are a lot more excited than ESPN’s sedate commentators but the folks back here are quieter, more intense.

An immigrant from Serbia, Johnny (probably not his real name, though he won’t confirm or deny that) doesn’t understand a word of the broadcast. “I don’t really care about this game,” he says. “I’ll root for Serbia and then, later, for the U.S.

The arched entrance of the old Parisian Novelty Co., at 3510 S. Western is one of my favorites. It's just the right height and width, visually. I dig how the letters in "Parisian" rise and fall to fill the arch. We're a city of buildings. Which means lots of opportunities to make a grand entrance.

Imagine being able to access an all-star lineup of great Chicago radio personalities hosting a wide array of popular music formats -- all for free and on demand.

It's here now: Without fanfare, Kurt Hanson's Chicago-based AccuRadio.com has launched Chicago Radio Online, a dream lineup of seven distinct formats hosted by some of the most popular local disc jockeys of the past four decades. (Here is the link.) It's also available as an app for both the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch platforms.

Given their high-profile success, it's inevitable that any two-person, guitar/drums duo arriving on the scene these days draws comparisons to the White Stripes and the Black Keys, so in what may be an effort to head that off at the pass, Chicago's Black Birdies drop the former name as the first on their list of influences (though the second is, oddly, missing).